Brief Intro: In 1985,
fourteen years after I had left the mainstream, to forge for
myself an alternative life in the San Francisco Bay Area, I found
I was in need of fresh horizons and new challenge. Life had become
too comfortable and rather middle-class, in our Berkeley living
collective, and I took the prompt of a fresh rise in the rent,
together with the prod of a rock-besotted neighbor-kid blasting in
on my quietude every day, as a doubled urge to once more hit the
road. I had but four more years until Social Security would
virtually eliminate the possibility of 'trying myself' as a
totally insolvent Innocent on life's (literal) highway. It was a
challenge I had always dreamed of taking on, and this appeared to
be the most likely moment for it.

Accordingly, I set off on a summer of wandering
that eventually, by an impossibly devious route, led me to the
Northwest. That footloose summer, however, was more than just a
venture into the wilderness of total insecurity; it became a
unique experiment, giving me an insider's view of the many ways
that an essentially provident Universe will 'do its thing' --
invisibly, except for someone imaginatively alert to the nuances
of what is going on. There were other kinds of fulfillment, too,
as are best detailed in the report that I sent out to my
constituency of old Black Bart readers.

The actual road journal that I kept is
scheduled for eventual inclusion on the site. But for now, this
pastiche tale will do.I wrote it shortly
after the journey, but not as a travelogue nor entirely as an
insight journal. I mainly wanted to highlight the incredible way
life responds, when approached from a different set of reality
premises. Here, then, is an account in brief, of . . .

The Summer of Infinite Presence

Well, I have seen the
elephant
. . . as was once said of certain great journeys of discovery. I have
been, for four months, at full departure from my old Berkeley haunts
- hitching my way around the country, an increasingly roadwise
"roadie," riding and residing with all kinds of people, tasting the
flavor of America, 1985.

My hosts have spread the spectrum: student, farm and construction
workers, salesmen and truck drivers, teachers and writers... I've
stayed in homes with backyard swimming pools and homes with backyard
toilets, ridden with people who needed gas money and others who
bought me meals, some who would put the fear of God into me, some
whose country-twang language almost called for an interpreter... but
one thing had they in common: the willingness to help a stranger on
the road or a weary friend at their door.

I have seen, too, the more characteristic side of our times: the
steady flow of mainstream isolation that passes a hitch-hiker by. Out
of fear, out of an inflated sense of privacy, I could never be sure -
but they gaze at me with a bland and indifferent curiosity, as if
seeing a strange creature of uncertain classification - as perhaps I
am. There are not many such as I on the road today, pleading passage,
claiming the alms of roadside charity. It is an unseemly vocation in
affluence-driven America, 1985.

Vocation? or vacation! It has been both for me, and much more.
Exploration, education, stimulation, fascination ... I tread the
ever-anxious tail of conventionality; I trade-in yesterday's me for
someone as yet not too clearly defined. But then, such definitions
are not to be framed in mere weeks or months. They cannot be
declared, only slowly sought and uncertainly created. All I can
account for at this midway point of passage is the grist that has
gone into the mill. Draw no conclusions just now, for my own are
likewise only tentative.

I wanted no definite plan or itinerary for the journey. Yet, such
enclosure has a way of erecting itself from a few preliminary
commitments. Innocent promises to be in Michigan by June, Minnesota
by July, and back in California by August provided my summer's limits
and largely determined which friends I would spend time with. It was
a counter-clockwise tour: down the California coast, through the
southwest, up through the farm belt east of the Mississippi, into the
land of sky-blue waters, and back across the Rockies by a
pre-arranged ride through the country's midsection. Most of my time
was spent between east Texas and Minnesota, the largest single block
of it in St. Paul. I had preceded this main run, however, with a
brief "warmup" trip (an April joke!) into northern California and
southern Oregon.

I've stayed with 32 households, six of them for a week or longer;
have spent only about one night in six on the "open road" (not
sheltered in a host home) and, in fact, did almost all of my actual
hitch-hiking in the first part of the journey.

But facts are barren. They don't even begin to touch the sense of
this journey. Where I went, who I met and stayed with, are almost
immaterial in themselves. The real thing I want to put across in this
accounting is something I probably cannot even capture in words, let
alone by facts and statistics. If I can ask your indulgence, I'm
going to make something of a collage of this newsletter, paying
little attention to proper sequence, maybe even varying the idiom of
my approach ... a series of episodes focusing on some invisible
point, and let's just see what happens.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Some sequence, of course, has to be respected, for the journey had
a beginning that set the tone for much of what followed.

"Trust your instincts," my friend, Donna, told me.

It would seem that I should not need that advice, for I have often
enough given it, myself. But I was asking her, in a psychic
counseling session a month before the journey, what it was all about?
Where was I going ... and most of all, why?

She told me that I could not know any of that, except as each step
is taken. That this journey would be, in fact, an introduction to the
very art of listening to my own inner voice and coming to trust that
it will be there precisely when it is needed. That I must learn to
give it precedence over all other plans, and even over my oracles
(the I Ching!). The one, after all, is The Real Thing; the other,
merely a vehicle for getting to it.

I took it as I take all such counsel: tentatively, and pending
some further great clarification as to what it all meant. For the
moment, it confirmed me in my several years of search for ways to tap
into right-brain awareness. I have wanted to get closer to this
source or "receiver" of the spiritual impulse in our lives. I have
been hungry for any bit of information, any exercise, that would help
clear the roadblock of Words that keeps obstructing Truth.

It came to pass, then, that on the morning after my very first
night out of Berkeley, I happened upon an imperfectly formed crystal,
about half the size of a forefinger joint, discovered in the yard of
a friend. I took this as a positive omen for the journey, for there
have been crystals along my way, found or given to me, ever since
this decade and this present trail began.

I have found that synchronicities often come in pairs, as a way of
emphasis - much as if to say: okay, once can be coincidence, but
twice is something else! Eight days after the discovery of
this first crystal came my moment of confirmation. I had been
lingering among friends in the north bay area, and was ready to take
longer strides toward Oregon. But I found myself suddenly stalled at
a freeway entry north of Santa Rosa. For three hours, broken by a
night's roadside rest, I had been waiting there. It was not a
terribly long wait, but the passing traffic was discouragingly
bleak.

I played with the idea of walking up a parallel roadway. It
seemed, from a hitch-hiker's perspective, a bit foolish - but not,
perhaps, for one who was "living on the road." It would erase my
boredom and lighten my spirits, and what care had I for time? Yet,
there is always an impatience to contend with on the road. I finally
had to flip a coin because I couldn't decide.

The coin told me to stay right where I was. I felt an instant pang
of disappointment, informing me of what I really wanted to do! But,
gee - hadn't the coin always given good advice? Or had it merely
released me from the burden of going deeper than my ambivalence! I
suddenly remembered Donna's counsel. I smiled at my precious
indecisions, shouldered my pack, and headed at once for the walkable
highway.

Not a hundred feet on my way, I looked down to see a quite
unbelievable second crystal! Big as a fat thumb, perfectly formed and
"crystal clear," it was an absolute jewel of personal validation! All
that day and the next, I walked - 25 miles, through blistering feet
and 90-degree heat, hardly concerned with the discomforts. I gazed,
repeatedly, at this marvelous crystal as I lay in soft grasses
beneath shade-towering trees; as I cooled my feet in trickling
creeks. I was never more sure of being on my path.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

If experience is sometimes a stern teacher that we are justifiably
wary of, then synchronicity is surely its playful, lively counterpart
- but a teacher, all the same. It has followed me all the course of
my journey, whispering wordless messages, alerting me many times to
things I would otherwise have given scant notice, helping me to frame
my own truth. Sometimes it seems only to be "having fun" with me. But
I know it doesn't fool with us, it is always saying something.

When I came back through Wisconsin for a second time, on my way to
connect with a cross-country return-home ride, I spent the night in
the Madison office of Basic Choices, an alternative network
center run by John Ohliger. The place is a nest of interesting books,
and I picked up one this evening - I'm not even sure, now, of the
name of it. Something like The Psychology of Transcendence. It
was a thick volume, devoted to the methodical evaluation of
paranormal and otherwise out-of-the-ordinary experiences that are
generally associated with mystical and altered states of
consciousness.

I turned to a section on synchronicity and read about how the
rarity of what we call pure chance may not after all be so rare.
Coincidence, says the author, may be more ordinary than we think. He
describes two experiments that can easily make the point: the
common-birthday game, and the small-world phenomenon.

On the birthday game, he notes that in any gathering of more than
23 people, it is statistically likely that at least two will have the
same month and day of birth! Twenty-three is the number at which the
odds for such a "coincidence" become a 50% possibility - a number far
fewer than most of us would expect.

The small-world phenomenon is an exercise that demonstrates how a
package may be delivered to someone entirely unknown to the sender,
anywhere in the country, in only 5 or 6 person-to-person transfers,
if each such transfer is directed toward a person who "might
reasonably know" either the addressee or someone who could
know him or her.

Concluding these impressive illustrations, the author closes the
passage with a quote from one Randall Collins: "Trust the experience,
not the interpretation."

Wanting to know something more about Collins and his quote, I
followed the footnote reference to find out that it was taken from a
book edited in 1977 by John Raphael-Staude. I recognized the name
immediately. I was living in Carmel, in 1977, and John Raphael-Staude
visited me there! - the only time in my life I have ever had
contact with the man.

"Trust only the experience, not the interpretation" - and
especially not the interpretation that so easily dismisses
such interpretations!

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

As if someone other than you - anyone other than you - can
mediate meaning about anything at all! The history books, the
newspapers, the government - do they provide meaning or do you
understand things for yourself? How much less likely, then, is the
truth of your own world to be found in anyone but you?

And maybe, then, you should consider the extent to which you can
establish meaning in your world! But where, you ask,
does one find guidelines for establishing meaning, if not in the
meaning provided by others?

Well... maybe in the careful cultivation of synchronicity,
itself!

In the winter months prior to my Berkeley departure, I became
vaguely and almost incredulously aware that the rainfall would cease
whenever I really had to go out of my house. It was so unreal that I
hesitated saying anything about it - but it seemed to be true, and I
wondered if it might be the promise or evolvement of a special kind
of Providence that is obviously of great value to someone on the
road.

At first, as I wandered through northern California in the
still-wet month of April, it seemed to be so: the charm held true.
But then in Oregon it failed me. I was thoroughly soaked in a steady
downpour, a few miles outside of Roseburg. My presumptions were
dashed and I became extra-cautious about rainfall thereafter; but I
wondered at the curious reversal, and continued to reflect on it.

The following month, as I headed south and east on the longer leg
of my year's journey, I was almost constantly under threat of
rainstorm and thunder shower - and the old charm seemed to be working
again! Many times, the rain would appear to alternate at the same
tempo as my intermittent lifts -- I'd be riding through rainfall, but
thumbing on a dry inter-stretch; or I'd have a country tavern on hand
at the precise moment I needed cover. Even on those evenings when a
rainy night was the sure prospect, some magical roadside shelter
would appear. One time it was the covered arcade of a vacant produce
stand; another time, the provident appearance of a yacht harbor, with
an untended cabin cruiser to crawl into for a perfectly dry night's
sleep.

As I thought more about the events of that earlier Oregon
occasion, something else that had been happening that day finally
entered into the context of my reflections. I had been in repeated
proximity to another man who was also hitching into Roseburg, but
only because he had been held up and robbed at a coastside Greyhound
depot. He was burdened with heavy luggage, had no money at all, and
had never hitched before. I gave him ride-priority and a certain
amount of encouragement, but I might have provided some real
support - like sharing foodstamps or the food I was carrying, or even
helping with his luggage (for it was dragging his ability to find the
best road spots). We who expect charity from the Universe (and who
does not?) must learn to recognize those occasions when it is
expected by the Universe of us! I came, finally, to
"understand," you see, that because I hadn't, in that instance, done
all that I might . . . I was rained upon.

Who's to say whether we discover such uncommon cause/effect
relationships or create them - or that there is really any
difference? It is interactive creativity with the Universe. We
"change our world" in such ways, and become then bound by what we
perceive - or conceive. We open a mythic path for
ourselves.

So I followed this insight. I considered myself as much an agent
of charity, thereafter, as its recipient, and shared as I was able,
through six amazingly dry weeks of frequently stormy weather. Day and
night, the charm sheltered me. Until I reached the far border of
Michigan, where something went wrong again. At Escanaba, near the
Wisconsin line, I walked out of town to where there was no possible
shelter, and got dumped on by a sudden cloudburst.

Where was my error!? I hadn't been uncharitable in any manner
that, I could see. but I did see something! I saw something in
synchronicity that had no connection at all with being charitable -
and at this point I made a leap of "understanding" that would not be
warranted on any connective basis; it can only be accepted within the
realm of a mythic path. Earlier that day, I had overstepped a sexual
boundary! I don't wish to share the details, but I must mention the
point because it is deeply woven in the themes of the journey.

I'd had a roadside "adventure" that morning. I was involved with
someone in a way that seemed situationally okay to me at the time;
but now, in the bath (the cleansing?) of my first drenching in more
than 3000 miles of open-road travel - in the illuminating light of
this mythic compact I had made with Spirit and Nature - the only
possible conclusion was that I had erred.

What I am saying, you see, is that the world, on an open road (on
any "open road"), is capable of being a pathway of messages -
of either confirmation or denial - for those who let it be so. I have
read, in anthropology texts, that the primitive tribesman lived in
constant fear of nature because he had no control over it. Much to
the contrary, nature was a bible to the primitive tribesman,
and he had need of no other! Its "ten commandments" were written in
storm and earthquake, rainbow and eclipse - while we moderns have
split this intimate and sacred dialogue into religion and science,
and discovered only that we "control" nature to the ultimate end of
our own destruction by it!

Yes, you can argue that it was all superstition; that we have
"proved" that storm and rainbow are mechanically accountable and have
no bearing on Truth or Spirit. But I will argue, in turn, that I have
proved (to my own satisfaction) that they are message bearers!

You can say that I have only "invented" messages of convenience to
my own morality and values - but I will say, in return, that
interpretation has never been anything but a subjective
experience - that the world has never had any other meaning than
those we've invented and decided to live by! So how can one meaning
(the moral one) be put down, in favor of any other (the political,
the social, the scientific)? Play the game that your heart feels best
with.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

This was exactly why I wanted to go on the road, in the first
place. To break away from the framework of life that says reality is
only as our left-brain insists it is.

Right-brain - where the rules change completely - is no match in
persuading us of its Truth, in a world that left-brain has
built and daily reinforces. But if we once find a way to break the
mold...! And the mold, of course, only exists in our own heads, and
only for so long as we continue to play its games (which seem to make
such "common sense" that we remain trapped in their endless circle).
But now I know...now I know...how easily the circle and the mold can
be broken...

Here is another slice of my journey, written for another
publication:

Me and Bruce rode out of Tyler, Texas, on Friday the 24th of May.
Not together - we didn't even know one another. I was hitch-hiking;
he was pulling an extra-long house trailer on what must have been a
two-ton pickup, if they make such things. I was four hours ahead of
him, because we had to get to Linden, Texas, 90 miles up the road
toward Nashville, at the very same time.

Don't ask me how it happened. It just happened. My first 30-mile
ride advised me to stay the hell out of Louisiana: weirdos and bad
roads. My next ride was going right on into Louisiana, to
Shreveport, except that he was short on gas money. I gave him a
couple bucks, just enough to get him there, but I didn't go the
distance with him. I remembered the other fellow's warning, and
dropped off at Marshall, where he stopped for the gas. Still, if I
hadn't fed the tank, I'd never have found myself there.

The third ride was easy - it came right out of the gas station,
where I drank a coke and thought about the long walk to the other end
of town. Makes no sense to hitch, going into a town, only coming out
of it. But this dude could see I was a roadie, and took me 40 miles
to Linden . . . where I found Bruce gassing up for his next 90 miles
of trailer haul.

Actually, Bruce found me. Said he'd had long enough, there, to
look this old hitch-hiker over, and realized I might make an
interesting passenger. If he'd seen me roadside, he told me, he'd
never have stopped for me. Now the really wild part of this is that
we'd both arrived back there in Tyler on the very same day, a
week earlier, and we'd both left there this same afternoon. And we'd
both reached this service station at the same time!

Bruce and me rode halfway through the night and halfway into next
day - all the way to Nashville, 500 miles. Like me, he lived on the
road, except he was doing it legit. He repaired microwave tower
antennae, hauled his home from job to job, one week in Texas, the
next in Kentucky, the next... while I was just bumming around, trying
to understand what things are all about, these days.

We talked, Bruce and me, all the way into the night - about every
damn thing you could think of. Jobs, women, football, guns,
hitch-hikers (yeah, Bruce had real loading on hitch-hikers and how
dangerous it is to pick them up), money, getting ahead in the world,
religion, reality... That's where we finally settled - on the
question of reality and what makes things the way they are.

That's when I found out how he and I had been matching pace, into
and out of Tyler. But it wasn't so surprising: I've been having
things like that happen ever since I left California. I've been
watching it - sort of like a hawk watches everything going on in the
grass down below, until he knows he can strike for a piece of
nourishment. And he gets it!

Yeah, watching reality happen is kind of like looking for my
nourishment. There's a lot more going on down there than anyone would
believe - both for the hawk and for me. And it isn't so simple or
straightforward as the boys with the measuring tools would have you
think.

I tell Bruce, outside of Memphis, that reality becomes just about
whatever he believes it will be - and that's a hard one for him to
handle. He can't quite hack that big a hunk of nourishment. So I feed
it to him in smaller pieces.

"Hey, now - you know a guy finds pretty much what he
expects to find in the world, right? Things work for him when he's
willing to take chances, or they don't if he's too uptight. The
ones who are afraid of life are the ones who get beat up by it."

"Yeah, that's for sure."

"And you get just about what you give, right?"

"Can't argue that!"

"Well, where the hell does what you expect, 'n what you
put out for it, come from, but out of what you believe?"

Bruce didn't talk for a long while, after that one. Maybe ten
minutes of road-rumbling silence while he chewed on it. And he
couldn't spit it back at me.

"You know," he finally said, "that just might change a
lot of my life around."

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Which brings us, I guess, to the most essential tale I have to
tell, and possibly the most elusive, and the one I know I'll have
most difficulty in finding the right words for. Partly because I'm
not fully clear, yet, on what it's all about. But there are other,
and more involved reasons for this hesitant opening: I am treading an
area that is like a minefield, booby-trapped with internal
sensitivities and prejudices that I fear most of us don't even
suspect are there.

I wonder if any of you have ever thought about the most hidden
face of prejudice.and bigotry in this country - where do you think it
is? We're pretty open about our racial and ethnic prejudices, these
days, and pretty easy with ideological and political ones - I mean,
we argue them, but we acknowledge them. But what about
religious prejudice? Not so bad, you say? No problem?

Well, I'm going to stick my neck out and say that every one of
us is a religious bigot!

I say it, because I've discovered that I, myself, have been one
for years - beneath my liberal/progressive/radical veneer. And I say
it because I don't know of anyone,who can openly consider it (of
themselves) - yet, I hear it every day, in the flashes of innuendo
about born-again Christians, about Catholics, about Rajneeshees,
about - yes, even Unitarians, even atheists!

And how do I define religious bigotry? The same as I define
any bigotry: it is not a question of acceptance or tolerance,
or even "loving thine enemy," it is thinking that one's own
way is somehow more enlightened. Because it is this relatively
minor bit of pride that results in putting other people down, unless
we catch ourselves on it.

This tale is not about the discovery of bigotry - that is only a
by-product. Yet, it may be the ultimate meaning of the tale, I'm not
sure it isn't. It's a tale of my own deliberate effort to
suspend bigotry, to drop my barriers of resistance long enough
to see what would come in as a result.

It was only in the few months before my journey began that I
copped to the fact that I did, indeed, have barriers of resistance. I
have been beset for years (I will not say plagued) by encounters with
fundamentalists and born-again Christians - mainly outside of my
personal friendships, but they were finally beginning to appear
within that:circle - and I consistently regarded them as accidental
and meaningless encounters. I finally realized two things: one, that
I was making a large and unwarranted exception to my general belief
that all things in one's world have personal meaning; two, that I was
putting a large amount of energy into warding the input off.

I saw, too, from last year's experience around Rajneeshpuram, the
nature of undiscovered bigotry, in almost everyone I know, and did
not want that sort of self-poisoning closed mind to be a part of my
makeup. It hides, usually, beneath the guise of "critical
consideration" - but it is bigotry, pure and simple, when there is no
possible room for a positive evaluation.

So I resolved to open myself, on this journey, to whatever,
of a religious nature (as opposed to what we New Age separatists call
spiritual), might come in on me. Any and all denominations, any and
all levels of expression.

The course of exposure was marvelous: a Passover Seder in Santa
Rosa, a born-again (and formerly Jewish) hitch-hiker near Cloverdale,
A Lutheran service in Boonville, a bible scholar in Cottage Grove, a
mystical-Catholic service in Monterey, a Unity lay-preacher (ex) in
Sedona, a Pentecostal service in Kokomo, a Unitarian minister in
Traverse City ... all over and every where I talked with people of
every persuasion, read parts of such books as seemed appropriate, was
given Bibles (yes, plural)... I even checked into a tiny wayside
chapel in northern Michigan, and bought my foods at Seventh Day
Adventist stores along the way.

But again, the facts say nothing. Let me try and share the feeling
of my experience.

The Lutheran service in Boonville came shortly after I had
embarked from Berkeley, and it cued me in a rather interesting way.
It just happened to be my birthday, and the pastor addressed his
sermon to Doubting Thomas!! I had pushed myself to be uncritically
open, and he was now telling me that skepticism is not such a bad
thing after all.

The "motion was seconded" a few weeks later in Monterey. "Father
Charlie" is a very special and off-beat Catholic priest. He does an
unorthodox Sunday service in his own home, and the small congregation
assembles around a magnificent quartz crystal centered in his
livingroom! He, too, spoke of Doubting Thomas - and "crystalized" my
willingness to maintain skepticism.

But I was finding myself, at the same time, more open to
talking with people about Jesus and Christianity than I had ever been
before. In the Sedona conversations with Dick Fishback, I came to see
that there is no essential difference in the reverence
expressed by many toward Jesus, by some toward Rajneesh, and by
myself toward what I simply call Spirit! Nor is the apparent
effect of this reverence much different in the lives of any of these
"devotees", as near as I could tell. There is the same uplift and the
same blind submission - the two sides of the devotional coin - in
all; even in myself!

It gave me a sharp jolt of self-critical reflection. How could I
maintain my own beliefs if I suspect the fallacy in those others? And
yet, it makes no sense to move back into atheism, for I have seen and
know too much about the reality of Spirit. But ... I can't go on
patronizing myself about "that fellow's obsessive devotion" as I turn
right around to continue prating my own.

I could see, too, that for all its "failures" in history, the
Christian Church has nevertheless provided the sole institutional
support (to my knowledge) for an ethic of Love and Charity and
Forgiveness. This is not to be lightly dismissed. That its
practitioners fall far shy of the vision is a separate matter and
does not, in itself, reflect unfavorably on the ideal or its vehicle,
nor certainly on its source.

Outside of Albuquerque, I was accosted by what seems to have been
the very last of a long line of "bible-belting" Fundamentalists
intent on bringing me the Word of the Lord. (The very fact that he
was the last, of a fairly steady stream over the years, has me
considering, in the light of what subsequently came to pass, that I
may have "gotten the message").

I was completely receptive to what he had to say to me, even to
the Bible he pressed on me, but afterwards felt more than a little
confused at what I should be seeing in all of this. I feel no
need to be "saved," feel no inner impulse at any level to become a
part of this mass movement toward a Christian heaven - so, what in
God's name (so to speak) is it all about? In the futility of that
moment, I made a slight, perhaps desperate "offering." I said that I
would consider it my message if, at any time in the course of
my journey, I should be picked up by a properly ordained minister of
any faith or denomination! Because, in l4 years of more and less
hitch-hiking, I had never, to my knowledge, received a ride from any
such. (Which is interesting in itself.)

A day later, I was rescued from a barren stretch of New Mexico
interstate by a young college student who wanted mainly to tell me of
his newfound respect for Mormons - because of their wholly charitable
act of repairing his automobile, which literally permitted his
continued journey across the country. He had suffered an
ignition-system failure, and the cost of a garage repair would have
forced a choice between leaving the car behind or not getting home.
He was ready, himself, to convert to the Latter Day Saints.

In Tyler, Texas, Elihu Edelson provided an interesting model for
me of a man who is able to embrace all faiths and linger on
none - maintaining his prime focus on a mystically spiritual New Age.
Elihu turned me loose, for a week, in a library with much provocative
material - including something called The Urantia Book, which
I can only reference, not describe.

In Kokomo, Indiana, I went into the Fundamentalist aspect as
deeply as I could go. There lives Alison, a longtime correspondent
who was "born again" in the years after our friendship began. We have
been a thorn in each other's side many times - but the correspondence
has somehow been maintained through sometimes long lapses. Now, I
bathed myself in two days of nitty-gritty dialogue with her and
husband Terry ... along with visits to sundry born-again friends, and
a Pentecostal Sunday service.

She first challenged me with the question of whether or not I
believed in God. I gave her all of my neat evasions - some of them
Unitarian, some of them atheist/agnostic, some of them my very own.
In the end, it finally and simply reduced to my discomfort with
the word, God, and its suggestion of a heavenly being.
I could acknowledge, however, that I don't believe in a
mechanical universe, nor in an accidental one... therefore, words and
labels and intellectualizations aside, I must certainly believe in
something that, with liberal fairness, translates as God - much to my
own surprise!

I was particularly curious about the Pentecostal service. I wanted
to see what these people were like in their worship. Well, they are
like any other denomination, essentially. Reverential, supportive,
loving - even reasonable! That is to say, there was very little in
the sermon that I could find to challenge. And I was beginning to see
something, now, which hit me with a good deal of impact.

All congregations (Jewish, Pentecostal, Unitarian,
etc.) express, within their ranks, the same fundamental ideals of
love, faith, sharing, charity, mutual support. But outside
of their ranks, they engage in a subtle warfare with almost every
other faith, over the precise and correct interpretation of the
"WORD". And we are right back, again, with the problem of Words
being roadblocks to Truth. The Truth, in this case, is what people
express as feeling (toward one another, toward their God
and their ideals) and as faith. The Word is the rational
and intellectual analysis of how it is structured and what it all
means. And we wield these Words that distinguish one denomination
from another with all the grimness of an apocalyptic battle -
completely losing sight of our common grace within Spirit. I think
it could be said, fairly, that Jesus brought a basis for spiritual
unity to the world, and the Bible has eroded it with words!

With this realization, I could see, finally, why the
right-brain need not and cannot speak to us in words - indeed, why it
dare not! Words and Spirit are simply of two different realms,
as mutually exclusive as church and state. I could also understand
why the Old Testament insists that the name of God cannot be written
or spoken; and, as well, the injunction in the Tao that "the way that
can be described is not The Way."

I found myself confronting a Unitarian minister, a week later in
Michigan, with this very challenge: to cease "chasing the mystery."
He could agree with me (or I with him) that the mystery cannot be
touched by intellect. He, however, upheld the effort to do so, while
I, now seeing the mischief of it, would back away.

Outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, a few days later, came the
encounter that I didn't actually believe I was waiting for. A busy
stretch of freeway with big trucks pounding by, and a seedy-looking
old Cadillac angled through them and stopped for me, way down the
line. An unimpressive heavyset man, perhaps my own age, not very
communicative, but we exchanged pleasantries and trivia for about 15
minutes until I finally asked him about the big, well-used bible
sitting on his dashboard.

"I'm an evangelist preacher," he said, without making any
fuss over it.

"....Do you mean ... you're an ordained minister?,"

"Yep."

I had to practically drag it out of him. He was Jim Hyde, fulltime
non-denominational evangelist, out of Green Bay, heading right
now for a Pentecostal church across the state, to do his thing. He
was also founder and president of the Revival Fires Evangelist
Association.

I needed to know, then, why he picked me up - and I probed
him as thoroughly as I could, trying not to be impertinent. Just an
impulse, he insisted. He seldom picked hitch-hikers up, but he saw me
and felt he had to pick me up.

"Was it, like...a 'divine' impulse?" I felt silly even
asking, but I had to know.

"Well," he lingered on it, "...I really can't tell the
difference!"

He took himself so easily, so naturally, that I knew absolutely he
was there for me. I told him, now, my own tale (not a word of
it before this moment), he seemed only moderately impressed, and we
immediately got down to three hours of the most rock-bottom religious
and anti-religious discussion that I was capable of finding words
for. I laid all of my doubts and skepticism before him, in
absolutely plain English.

In retrospect, I can't believe how little of that 3-hour
conversation remains with me - except for the impressions. I do know
that I felt thoroughly vindicated in my own spiritual path, by this
evangelist - and at the same time, fully accepted by him from where
he was coming from. Let me quote from my own road-journal,
written the following morning:

"He was so beautifully validating of where I'm at, and
what I see, that I feel he was really heaven-sent! The entire
non-denominational bit, in the first place; his criticism of
Pentecostals, their unneccessary `speaking in tongues'; the
limitations that each sect imposes on its believers; the
accent [so foolishly placed by many] upon wealth as a sign
of devoutness, etc. He agreed with me that the focus of any
real spirituality is God, not Jesus! And that Jesus, himself, had
always maintained this. I told him, quite frankly, that I just
cannot speak, or relate to, a Christian vernacular, and he said it
made no difference at all - that the temple is inside each of us,
and that our own inner light is the ultimately true guideline -
that no man can teach [another] outside of that.

"...I spoke of my inability to 'ask Jesus into my heart' - as
is always pleaded by the charismatics - that I felt no need for
it, and insufficient spiritual freedom in it and he somehow gave
me to understand that in this very quest of mine I had, in
fact, 'let Jesus in'! The realization both shocked and pleased
me."

Apologies for the lack of literary refinement, but that is "raw
data." My expressed surprise was not so much at anything he said
(except for that last note), but that I should hear these things from
an evangelist - and, of course, that it was so clearly a gift on my
own quest - asked for and received.

But remember what I said about synchronicities often coming in
pairs? Barely a week later, still in Wisconsin, I was picked up by a
second minister! This one was a retired Methodist minister,
eight years older than I, and he was just as precisely "for me" as
Jim Hyde, but in an outrageously different way. This old-timer, as
grizzled as I, had just, the week before, hitch-hiked from
Tennessee to Wisconsin - even by much the same route as I! I found
more of my own nature in him, and it was as though the Universe had
thought to balance things out a bit, in giving me the doubled blast
of a confirmed synchronicity.

So what does it all add up to, this unlikely sideshow of my
journey? Am I being born again? Am I turning into a Jew for Jesus? Am
I copping-out on my years of level-headed detachment from all things
smacking of fanatic belief? Am I making some new and possibly
questionable commitment?

Probably no to all of the above - but I'm not sure that all
the data is in yet, or that all the right questions have been asked.
It is very clear that something has been happening in my
belief-structure, even if I am unable as yet to define it. But let me
roam a bit, through some speculations that aren't so black-or-white
as the above, and see if I can give you a bit of what I do
newly feel, on these matters.

We of this century who have steered clear of religiosity have done
so because it had become sterile and hollow - made the more so,
perhaps, by a world in which science became enshrined, and money, too
- the twin "religions" of our secular age. In the excesses of these
two idolatries, a spiritual impulse was bound to re-emerge, as all
things seek a condition of balance, sooner or later. And it emerged
in a variety of forms: Fundamentalism in the Near East, a surge of
eastern mysticism in the West, the "re-birth" of Christianity among
those, here, not inclined toward mysticism - very few of us have not
felt the impulse in one form or another.

Yet we have failed to recognize its basic underlying commonality;
we have begun, once again, the age-old squabbles over who's got the
right vision - the very same tensions that have led, all through
history, to religious wars, inquisitions, pogroms.

I think my perspective, now, is to move away from this question of
who's got the right vision. I think it's time, now, to allow
every vision - what's more, to encourage every vision,
to respect and even participate in all of them! Isn't this, after
all, what we're trying to practice in our civil affairs? In our
domestic affairs? Should it be any different in our religious
affairs?

And as with all the rest of those, I think it has to start "right
here" in each one of us. Yes, I accept Jesus Christ! - even though
I'm still a Pantheist! Why not? He and I stand for most of the same
things in life! And if Jim Hyde's world can embrace me, mine can
embrace Alison - whether she feels that way about me or not. Let's go
for it!!

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Just as Nature and Spirit provided me with a pair of crystals to
certify the start of my journey, I was gifted at its end with one of
the rarest phenomena, I'm quite sure, in all of nature. A
moonbow!

Pat Nelson and I were coming in toward California from the eastern
side of the country, both of us to attend the first national
Holyearth/Earthsteward's gathering. It was the night of the second
full moon of July - what Pat calls the night of the "blue moon"
(because it comes only once in a ...) - and we were on one of the
lesser highways, coming out of Nebraska and into Colorado, looking
for a campsite.

Actually, the entire evening was a display of natural spectacle:
first, an incredible sunset, behind and around towering stormclouds -
with horizontal cloudlines so thick and dark that we were sure they
were mountains, until they began to distort and fragment like pulled
taffy; then the storm itself, and its silently sky-rending lightning
flashes; and then, as darkness intensified ahead of us, the full moon
rose in a nearly clear sky to our left-rear.

We angled south, now, and suddenly, in the pitch-black of the
storm center out my right-side window, I saw a pale white arc - grey
would be closer to the truth, grey and ghostly and about 60 degrees
of arc. It made no sense to me. It was not the light of anything I
could imagine. We parked to look at it, and it finally struck us what
it must be! Sure enough, the arc could be vaguely traced all the way
across the horizon, and it was exactly opposite the full moon, now an
hour's height in the sky. We stood clear of the van, and our own
moonshadow neatly bisected the arc - as is true of any rainbow.

This was a moonbow! A sunbow (a true rainbow) is supposed to have
been a special covenant sign between God and the Jews, according to
the Old Testament; and it strikes my fancy that a moonbow may be one
for the present age, where we've had quite enough of the sun's yang
influence in the world, and perhaps need a moon-covenant to bring
things back into balance.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

It was, in all, a lovely summer - too swiftly gone, and yet
endlessly present. A kind of time passage I have never known before.
Events of the very recent past seemed to be forever ago, and the near
future had no reality at all.